Why we love hideous food

I’m sitting on a stone terrace in the winsome south Breton port of Sainte Marine, which oversees France’s prettiest river (the Odet), and I’m excitedly tucking into a dozen gleaming Morbihan oysters. I am doing this partly because I am writing about travel in Brittany and oysters are very much part of the package here – you come to Brittany, you must consume oysters (also cake, cider, biscuits, tinned sardines and chunky buckwheat crepes). But I’m also eating oysters because I really love oysters.

At this point I imagine a reasonable percentage of Spectator readers will be wincing. Because oysters are a divisive issue. Some, like me, seize any opportunity for a demi douzaine on the half shell, others are much more meh, and a hardcore of bivalve-refusers find the whole idea repulsive. These skeptics simply say: look at them, it’s like someone went for a long walk around a sooty steel town, then coughed up a wad of polluted phlegm.